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Comment by vikbytes | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic. I never liked the cookies sticking around forever, and managing them manually was a massive pain if you wanted to keep some of them.

Not to mention Firefox is usually brought to its knees when trying to delete large segments of History/Cookies at once.

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> This is fantastic. I never liked the cookies sticking around forever, and managing them manually was a massive pain if you wanted to keep some of them.

You might like the CookieAutoDelete plugin[1]. It's a recommended plugin which allows you to set a list of domains and domain patterns which retain their cookies while others are deleted. I've been using it for a couple of months now, and I love it.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

I’ve been using it for a similar time period and it’s great for reading paywalled articles.

There is a newer extension called CookieBro that is much better than CookieAutoDelete. Not only does it have more options for dealing with cookies, CookieAutoDelete often would leave some cookies alive.

I use cookie quick manager.

It can delete all cookies on closing browser (except the ones you have 'protected' in the addon settings like reddit and YT)

You cab also edit cookie values and change properties, etc

Unfortunately CookieBro is not open-source it seems.

That is a fantastic plugin although unfortunately it's not (yet?) available in the new mobile Firefox - nor any equivalent. It's still there for the old version if you haven't been force-upgraded.

Yes to CookieAutoDelete. Medium was what pushed me over the edge to start using it. Has been working very well so far.

CookieAutoDelete has some fatal flaws. It doesn't delete indexeddb, for instance. Also, if you're a tab hoarder it simply doesn't work for the common sites you visit. Temporary containers[1] is a much better option, as it uses firefox's container tabs to provide much tighter isolation.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I recommend Forget Me Not as an alternative.

https://github.com/Lusito/forget-me-not/

Or "Temporary Containers" which is the same as Cookie Autodelete but for all cached data instead of just cookies.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I just tried it based on your recommendation. Unfortunately it doesn't support private mode and I run Firefox in private mode.

Cookie AutoDelete works in private mode.

Using uMatrix makes this redundant. It always allows cookies to be sent, but only sends them back to the server iff the domains are in the allow list.

Thank you!

I just installed it, and it does a great job.

> Not to mention Firefox is usually brought to its knees when trying to delete large segments of History/Cookies at once.

Is that still the case? I remember that one of the developers was seriously working on improving that.

Yep, still a problem for me last week, deleting entries numbering more than about 300 seems to be the magical breaking point.

Yes. The “magic number” seems to be 300 items on my machine. Anything above that will start to seriously freeze the browser.

I remember looking into this and it's a bit of a tangle. some of the oldest code in the codebase I think.

> Not to mention Firefox is usually brought to its knees when trying to delete large segments of History/Cookies at once.

Nine year old bug related to this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643

The 'Library' window in general is clearly neglected trash. For instance it still doesn't get themed like the rest of Firefox.

What cookies are you trying to get rid of? Why are they a big deal?

The ones that track your identity are sort of a big deal. There's no reason to keep this litter hanging around.

You've got it completely backwards. Invert your questions: What cookies shouldn't be deleted, and why shouldn't they be deleted? The continued existence of a cookie requires justification, not the deletion of a cookie. Only a small minority of cookies exist for the users' benefit.

I don't personally care if some ad network made a few pennies off me, and preventing that wouldn't be worth the inconvenience to me.

Disable it then, just because you're apathetic to such matters doesn't mean the application should assume everybody is.

>inconvenience

It's seriously doubtful you or any other user will notice any negative ramifications from third party cookies being deleted, because there basically are none.

We'll notice the inconvenience when more services get paywalled due to not being able to make enough ad money.

then they should show ads without all the tracking...

Well, it certainly seems like you care, so which is it? Do you care or not care?

Apathetic to cookies or being tracked, care about free services. Not really complicated.

You might want to try uMatrix. It lets you choose which sites are allowed to use cookies.

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